The way we learn is changing. In his Predictions for 2015 report, Josh Bersin states we are in an era where corporate learning is going through as much change as we witnessed when eLearning hit the scene. Corporate learning strategies have always treated learning as an event. That’s not how we learn best. We learn continuously, on the job. We learn by making mistakes and solving problems. Your learners are asking you to shift away from formal training to more focused, ad hoc learning. How do you evolve your learning strategy to adapt to this shift?

In this session you explore the revolutionary way technologies such as video, portable content, mobile, social, and analytics are changing the way we learn today, and how we are evolving to more ad hoc, on demand, self-directed learning. You will gain a better understanding of what we need to invest in today to support the new models of learning that will drive the way we learn tomorrow.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the learning culture is changing, putting the learner in control
• How innovations are driving the on-demand, granular, and contextual delivery of content
• How portable and adaptive content is key to supporting the 70 percent of how we learn
• How analytics, combining xAPI and cognitive computing, are essential to understanding the value of the 70:20:10 model

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Training focuses on learning and performance improvement, but we typically only access the knowledge aspect of performance. What about emotion? To truly improve performance, training in context is essential and that includes training employees to leverage their knowledge and control their emotions.

In this session, you will explore the latest biometric technologies and how you can leverage them for learning and performance improvement. You will see examples in the entertainment and games industries, and look at how we can leverage these technologies for learning to expand our ability to not only train skills, but train performance within the content.

In this session, you will learn:

• The potential for training the whole learner: knowledge, skills, and emotion
• How games are currently leveraging biometrics to impact the game experience
• How biometrics could improve immersive learning experiences
• What the future holds for biometrics

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Games, mobile, and virtual reality.

Given the choice, many learners will choose mobile abstracts over books, YouTube DIY over lecture, single-point lessons over ILT, and JIT mobile reinforcement over day-long training. This is a very real challenge most T&D departments are facing. While they all have legacy training courses that are traditionally a day longer or more, learners today do not enjoy or benefit by these long-form training methodologies.

In this session you will learn about the innate problems with traditional long-form training, as well as the necessary micro-learning skillset to start making improvements. You’ll learn the three elements of transforming your existing training content into engaging bite-sized chunks. The first element is “shock treatment,” where you will learn how bite-sized principles, reinforced by brain science, is the future of learning. The next element is “first aid,” where you will learn how to apply micro-learning principles to your existing ILT courses. The final element is “group massage,” where group discussion will assist you in troubleshooting your traditional training challenges.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why we need to commit to breaking up our training into smaller pieces
• From brain science, how bite-sized learning is the future
• How to apply micro-learning principles to your existing ILT courses and other forms of traditional training
• How to troubleshoot your traditional training challenges and come up with bite-sized solutions

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

While universities continue to explore the new possibilities of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in establishing global brand, learning research, and innovation, corporate training has begun a deeper look into using MOOCs for their own purposes. How would a landscape of higher ed–produced MOOCs being used by corporate training benefit both types of organizations?

In this session, you will learn the emerging trends in which global corporations are seeking to partner with MOOC providers for various types of offerings. You will learn how universities are using MOOCs as spaces to experiment with and research innovative online teaching practices and how these discoveries may lead to new opportunities for application in corporate training. By seeing how universities are approaching MOOCs, you will learn about an emerging framework for extending partnerships with higher ed for more cost-effective access to the subject matter expertise and learning practices that universities provide.

In this session, you will learn:

• What MOOCs are and their current status in the higher ed market
• Why universities decide to develop and deliver MOOCs
• How using courses from MOOC providers may benefit corporate training functions
• What emerging trends in MOOCs are pulling corporate interests and higher ed closer together

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers with a working knowledge of how to design, deliver, or manage training or educational offerings, including online, blended, or classroom.

Technology discussed in this session:
MOOCs.

In 2013, SunTrust Bank began a multi-year journey to consolidate its key mortgage underwriting business applications that would enable strategic growth and improved customer service. This new way of doing business required a pioneering approach to capability building and systems training for end-user adoption of their business application.

In this session you will learn how a flexible training and adoption program led to successfully preparing thousands of geographically dispersed users. You will learn the strategies employed to streamline the content creation and content maintenance efforts and how SunTrust and Assima scoped a large multi-vendor project. Finally, this session will reveal the methods used to create and maintain a strong, successful partnership.

In this session, you will learn:

• Flexible approaches to assuring end-user training and adoption during multi-phased, large-scale system implementations
• Strategies for streamlining large-scale content creation and maintenance
• Strategies for scoping large projects and dealing with multiple vendor dynamics
• Proven methods in building and sustaining long-lasting partnerships that drive success

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Rapid development tools, readily available templates, mobile delivery, social media. These advancements have opened up the eLearning industry to more than just learning professionals with deep skills in both instructional design and programming. An instructor with PowerPoint skills can now quickly and cheaply develop eLearning. Although technology has improved, has instructional design followed suit, or has it been undermined by conformity and complacency?

In this session, you will learn more about what has changed and what has not, what’s still valid and how to take advantage of opportunities for technology-supported learning. Through the use of animated visuals and examples, you will learn alternative concepts and processes applied together with examples of the outcomes they produce. You will gain a firm grounding in facts, helping you take advantage of what’s really new and helpful in learning design. You will leave having experienced real-world examples of learning technologies that actually change behaviors and measurably improve performance instead of simply providing access to information and ensure reading.

In this session, you will learn:

• What remains fundamental about instruction and learning even while technology advances
• What needs to be rethought or added to our thinking to take full advantage of new technologies
• Primary considerations in designing performance-improving learning experiences
• Simpler techniques for designing advanced eLearning, such as how to derive context, challenge, activity, and feedback directly

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Online learning is delivered directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, we need to move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive, and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

In this session, you will learn the six key components of a learning and performance ecosystem and see examples of how they can be applied in dozens of combinations to create learning and performance solutions. You will work through a sample scenario with your peers to analyze a problem and brainstorm a multifaceted solution that takes full advantage of the learning and performance ecosystem. You will learn a practical approach to getting started with learning and performance ecosystem solution design.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to describe a learning and performance ecosystem
• How to identify an opportunity for an ecosystem solution
• How to work with stakeholders and experts to define and prioritize factors that contribute to the problem
• How to identify the best way to measure success
• How to identify ecosystem components available to you
• How to apply components to create a solution

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

There are several methodologies that can be employed in training development projects, but when time, cost, and quality are not negotiable, an agile development approach may be ideal. Dairy Queen recently introduced a brand-new product line to its 6,500+ franchise organization. In preparation for this momentous rollout, Dairy Queen needed to create an interactive training program to quickly prepare thousands of franchisees and their crew on the sales and operations of an entirely new product platform for worldwide delivery.

In this case study session you will learn how the Successive Approximation Model (SAM) was used to analyze behavioral and performance needs and design effective and intuitive learning templates. You will also see how Dairy Queen progressed through this agile process, beginning with brainstorming sessions, iterative functional prototype reviews, and the development and review cycles of new product eLearning courses. Additionally, the needs for localization and delivery methods required for a global market will be discussed.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to follow an agile development approach for rapid, flexible, and effective solutions
• To design effective sales and operational interactions for global, front-line employees
• Best practices for developing a localization strategy for agile development projects
• To employ reusable learning objects/templates that allow for constant, rapid changes and still support localization
• How to create offline, executable (CD/DVD-based) instances of a web-based learning solution

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
ZebraZapps, Node Webkit, PC/Mac.

Training employees and clients is an ongoing challenge. People are busy. Training is expensive, time consuming and usually pretty boring. Athenahealth has a wide range of clients, from physicians and nurses, to front desk staff, and medical billers. Their schedules are chaotic, they have little time to train, and their focus is on doing what they do best, helping patients. The challenge was in moving from an eLearning-heavy approach to a more context-based, hands-on, just-in-time one to meet the needs of learners in this complex environment.

In this case-study session, you will learn about athenahealth’s transition from a traditional eLearning approach to a more responsive model that focuses on experiential learning and performance support. You will see the changes made in the development process, the implementation of new technologies, improved client access to support resources, and updates to the content and LMS. You will explore both the successes and failures in their efforts to become the perfect waiter, ready to help the moment you need them, but invisible when you don’t.

In this session, you will learn:

• How athenahealth successfully transitioned to a performance focused training and support model
• How experiential learning should be the focus of your training efforts
• The importance of providing support in the moment of need
• Understanding how you can apply the changes athenahealth put in place to your own training challenges

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Kenexa/IBM LCMS, WalkMe, Assima Learning Suite, Jive, Cornerstone LMS, and Adobe Captivate.

The importance of social factors in learning are well established. But knowing how to best influence and impact these factors remains something of a mystery to most organizations. A number of thought-leaders have suggested you can’t do much of anything to impact social learning in the workplace. They are wrong. You can design social learning opportunities and measure their impact. Drawing on research, and from our experiences of working with some of the leading organizations in the world, we’ve developed our own social-learning playbook. Now we invite you to develop your own, based on the framework we provide.

In this session you will develop your playbook on how to make the most of the opportunities social learning provides. Punctuated by insights from real-world studies and supported by learning data, you will gain a series of insights to help you with the successful design and deployment of social learning and enable you to proceed with confidence and direction.

In this session, you will learn:

• What makes for effective social-learning experiences
• The asynchronous and real-time design techniques used to facilitate social learning
• Applicable design techniques for your situation
• How to use data to prove the impact you are having

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced managers and directors with some background in the notion of social learning and/or the 70/20/10 framework. Even better … you’ve tried to develop a more social-learning experience of your own.

Technology discussed in this session:
Common social-learning tools by way of example such as Yammer, SharePoint, or Jive. However, this session is more a tactical exercise than a technical demonstration. The tools you use are likely to be the ones at your disposal.

The traditional lecture-based classroom format of corporate training can be time consuming, inefficient, and costly. A number of companies have switched to an eLearning model, which is much more cost effective but can be a difficult platform to teach concepts that require the higher forms of cognitive learning.

In this session you will see how Alaska Airlines successfully leveraged the flipped classroom model to reduce class time and increase employee engagement. You will learn how this dynamic flipped classroom model incorporates eLearning, videos, and classroom activities devoted to teaching government regulations and customer service. You will leave with tools, tips, and ideas for implementing the flipped classroom model into your own organizations.

In this session, you will learn:

• The benefits of flipping the classroom
• When it is appropriate to flip the classroom
• Change management tips for deploying a successful flipped classroom course
• Lessons learned from Alaska Airlines regarding the flipped classroom
• Tools for flipping the classroom (suggested authoring and multimedia tools)

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 2, GreenLight LMS.

Technical training solutions often lack the rigor that leaders want to see when they are trying to answer the question, “Is our technical field ready?” Even when training activities and resources do require learners to go deep technically and to be challenged, the measure of learners’ readiness is too often based on attendance at an event or consumption of training assets.

In this session you will get an in-depth view of the important role that technical certifications can play as part of the learning roadmap for technical sellers and other technical professionals. You will get an end-to-end view of the planning, development, and implementation of a large-scale technical certification requirement for over 4,000 technical sellers and other technical professionals. While the specific certifications and exams addressed in this session might not be directly relevant to your circumstances, the lessons learned from the profiled initiative will help anyone contemplating a similar type of effort be better set up for success from the outset.

In this session, you will learn:

• The value of including a formal certification requirement in the learning roadmaps of technical staff
• The keys to success for planning a formal certification requirement in learning roadmaps
• The keys to success for implementing a formal certification requirement in learning roadmaps
• The keys to success for sustaining and building upon a formal certification requirement in learning roadmaps

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft Azure.

You can read the statistics yourself: Bersin reports that nearly 60 percent of CLOs will enjoy an 8 percent budget increase in 2015. But so what? About what are they thrilled? What keeps them up at night?

In this session, you will have the opportunity to peek into the mind of today’s CLO through information gathered by a consultant. Gain an undersanding of their views of joys and vicissitudes. You will learn successful lessons from CLOs and gain insights from their horror stories as well. Use their views to discuss the role of learning, performance, and technology in the enterprise, and leave this session better able to consider potential implications for your contributions and your career.

In this session, you will learn:

• What CLOs are currently satisfied with
• Where CLOs are challenged
• To contextualize CLO priorities into your own work
• How to use this information towards personal professional growth

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

There is a huge difference between the traditional levels of interactivity for asynchronous eLearning and interactions. Levels of interactivity delineate the mechanical complexity used during the request for proposal (RFP) and proposal stages of business development, sales, and contracting to determine scope and pricing for an eLearning project. Interactions, on the other hand, have to do with the actual design of the eLearning project to bring about the desired performance change. We have interactivity (mechanical) and interactions (instructional). How do we work with both to achieve what we want for our learners?

In this session, you’ll explore the differences between interactivity and instructional interactions. You’ll find ways to align the simplicities and complexities of each to accomplish your learning objectives (both instructional and performance). You’ll learn a methodical, reproducible process you can take back to your organization to start building better eLearning courses immediately.

In this session, you will learn:

• The different levels of eLearning interactivity
• How to apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to instructional and performance objectives
• How to create instructional interactions using the different levels of interactivity
• How to create performance interactions using the different levels of interactivity

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

We’ve spent years aiming our focus at being good business partners. We build our road maps around urgent and emergent business needs. We have begun to dispel the notion of learning styles. These are all good steps. But are we getting too far away from our understanding of the learner’s experience? Understanding the needs of our business partners is useless if we don’t understand how our work will land with our learners. How can we seek to understand how the learner’s experience plays out in our learning ecosystem?

In this session, we’ll look at the importance of evaluating business goals, the technical environment, and the learner experience. You will learn how to use real-world examples of building data-based learner personas and how personas can be used to build a better vision, create a better road map, and make better decisions for both business impact and the learner experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why it’s important to understand the learner’s experience
• What a good persona looks like
• How we build personas
• How we use personas to make decisions

Audience:
Intermediate designers, developers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A